English as a Second Language: Should we be Alarmed over this Development?

It appears that decades of open borders and political sensitivity has finally caught up with us. After sifting through the 2013 census data, the Center for Immigration Studies has found that 61.8 million U.S. residents, speak a foreign language at home. That is 1 in 5 people, and a 2.2 million increase since 2010. The data was compared to the 2010 statistics, and it was found that the largest increases were for Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic.

So should we be alarmed over this development? After all, we are a nation of immigrants. Each and every one of us could probably trace our lineage to an immigrant. Many of you reading this right now have ancestors that arrived to this country within the last century.

However, it should be noted that we aren’t just a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of assimilated immigrants. If you read the data provided by this study, you’ll find that our system of assimilation is completely broken.

Of the school-age (5 to 17) nationally, more than one in five speaks a foreign language at home. It is 44 percent in California and roughly one in three students in Texas, Nevada, and New York. But more surprisingly, it is now one in seven students in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Nebraska and Delaware; and one out of eight students in Kansas, Utah, Minnesota, and Idaho.

Many of those who speak a foreign language at home are not immigrants. Of the nearly 62 million foreign-language speakers, 44 percent (27.2 million) were born in the United States.

Of those who speak a foreign language at home, 25.1 million (41 percent) told the Census Bureau that they speak English less than very well.

So if you counted only school age children, the ratio is actually higher than 1 in 5. Nearly half of the people who speak a foreign language at home, were born here. The fact that these rates are higher among children, is a strong indicator that our nation is failing to assimilate its immigrants.

While it would be expected that the children of immigrants would speak their parents tongue, especially at home, the number of people who have a poor grasp of the English language is astounding.

In addition, this growth isn’t a recent trend. The number of people who speak a foreign language at home, as well as our population of foreign born residents, has been growing for decades

The percentage of the U.S. population speaking a language other than English at home was 21 percent in 2013, a slight increase over 2010. In 2000, the share was 18 percent; in 1990 it was 14 percent; it was 11 percent in 1980.

So will we be able to assimilate these immigrants in the years ahead? It’s possible. Historically, there have been times when the United States was teeming with foreigners. Between the late 1800′s until around 1910, the foreign born population peaked at nearly 15 percent. However this was followed by many decades of decline. We had several generations of very low immigration rates. We had time to teach them our culture, language, and history. By the 60′s and 70′s, the millions that immigrated here at the turn of the century had fully integrated into our society.

The problem we’re facing now is that our institutions have completely failed to assimilate this wave of immigrants. How can we teach our children to be Americans, when they are scolded for wearing the American flag in school, and their textbooks give biased lessons on Islam?

How can our military, which has long been an avenue for citizenship, continue to do so if they allow illegal aliens and gang members into the ranks?

How can we even begin to teach immigrants about the American way of life, when it is easier to ignore our laws, sneak across our sovereign borders, and still receive welfare benefits and special treatment?

If our country can’t assimilate this wave of foreign born people, then our society is going to be in a lot of trouble. From Africa, to India, to the Middle East, the world is full of multiethnic nations that are tearing themselves apart. This trend won’t be limited to poor third world countries either. In Europe, the rise of secession movements in Britain, Spain, France, and Italy are on track to break those nations apart, while the millions of Muslim immigrants that they have failed to assimilate, are building their own separate societies within Europe.

So what do you think? Will America experience ethnic conflict in the near future? Can we take control of our borders and begin the process of integrating our immigrants, or is it too late?

About the AuthorMac Slavo

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